If you’re dreaming of a White Christmas, this article might just be for you.
December is Denver’s third-biggest snow month on the calendar, with more than 8 inches of snow on average. December is also, at least on average, the biggest snow month each meteorological winter, with springtime March and April coming in as Denver’s two biggest snow months overall.
December is semi-famously home to Denver’s biggest snowstorm in recorded history, a crippling 45.7-inch event back in 1913. It was such a bad storm that horses had to pull cars to safety, and simply finding free space to put all the snow became difficult. Don’t worry, you’ll read plenty more about that storm below.
But the 1913 record-breaker is also far from the only big December snowstorm in Denver’s recorded weather history. Here’s a look at the top five, including three major Christmastime snow events:
5. Dec. 25-27, 2007
Fun fact: Denver’s snowiest Christmas Day on record came back in 2007, when 7.4 inches of snow fell. This was part of a 13.8-inch, three-day snowstorm that started on Christmas morning.
Another 6.4 inches of snow fell on Dec. 27, rounding out an especially snowy December of 2007. Denver recorded 20.9 inches of snow that year, good enough to finish up as the sixth-snowiest December on record.
4. Dec. 23-28, 1987
This was truly a long-duration event. More than a foot-and-a-half of snow (18.6 inches) fell in Denver over a six-day stretch, including an impressive 9.6 inches on the 27th. By the end of this storm, a full 17 inches of snow were on the ground in Denver.
Part of the impact from this six-day run of snow also came from the bitter cold accompanying the snowfall. On Christmas Day, the mercury dropped all the way down to -2 degrees, and it dropped below zero the next morning as well.
3. Dec. 20-21, 2006
Lots of you will probably remember this epic snowstorm, which dropped 20.7 inches of snow over just two days. That 20.7-inch total still has it as one of Denver’s top 10 snowstorms on record. Some parts of Colorado saw more than 4 feet of snowfall, shutting down Interstates 25, 70 and 76 for the better part of two days.
The National Guard was activated to rescue stranded motorists, Denver International Airport shut down for nearly three days, and RTD was forced to completely suspend service for the first time in nearly five years. This 2006 story reflects on one of the biggest Denver snowstorms in recent memory.
2. Dec. 24, 1982
While it’s not the top one on this list, this is perhaps the greatest Denver snowstorm in recorded history. Denver’s snowiest day on record took place on Christmas Eve 1982, when a whopping 23.6 inches of snow fell on that day alone. But the Christmas Blizzard of 1982 will forever be famous for the high winds that whipped up monstrous 10-to-15-foot snow drifts, requiring weeks to fully clear up.
This 2012 account of the 1982 blizzard recalls supermarkets running out of supplies and hospitals making desperate pleas for four-wheel-drive vehicles to transport patients. It even perhaps cost then-Mayor Bill McNichols his job the following spring: challenger Federico Peña campaigned, in part, on the disastrous handling of the 1982 storm.
1. Dec. 1-5, 1913
Denver’s largest recorded snowstorm shut down the city for days, requiring horses and wagons to spend days clearing a whopping 45.7 inches that fell over four days. Ironically, horses also had to dig up stranded automobiles and return them to their owners.
Here’s a rather striking headline from The Denver Post’s December 5th, 1913 edition:
“No trains… No Schools… No Taxis, No Mails, No Noises, No Deliveries, No Funerals, Nothing But Snow, Snow, Snow and Still Falling…”
Also from The Post’s archives: “The only means of transportation was a sturdy pair of legs.”
Another rarity about this snowstorm was the temperature throughout the storm. Typically, Denver’s bigger snow events come when the temperature is in the teens or 20s, when colder air is able to increase liquid-to-snow ratios and create a fluffier, rapidly accumulating snowfall.
But during the 1913 storm, temperatures hovered near the 32-degree mark, creating an extraordinarily heavy, wet type of snowfall. An astronomical 4.18 inches of liquid precipitation (that’s if you took the snowfall and converted the moisture to a liquid equivalent) fell from the storm.
For context, that 4.18-inch mark is more than 11 times the monthly precipitation average for the entire month of December. That’s a nearly unheard of amount of liquid for any month in Denver, let alone during the typically drier winter months.
The 1913 Denver snowstorm was the kind of snowstorm that even if it took place today, with modern forecasting and technology, it would still wreak an untold amount of havoc, crippling Denver for perhaps a week or more.
